BarCamp Nairobi Technology Survey

BarCamp Nairobi took place this past weekend and several bloggers estimated that there were over two hundred participants. As part of BarCamp, Erik Hersman, kindly conducted a simple survey for us. In this short post, I will give a brief summary of the results of the survey. For more details on BarCamp Nairobi, consult Erik's blog and flickr pages.

The goal of the short survey was to get a feel for the technologies favored by the attendees. Of the 52 completed surveys, 21 respondents (40%) cited php as one of their primary programming languages.

27 (or 52%) cited one of the common scripting languages (perl, python, php, ruby). The fact that c# was more popular than python, ruby, and perl, is probably indicative of the local IT job market as well. Windows and Linux garnered almost the same number of users:

In a previous post, I mentioned a paper Erik wrote that outlines the importance of cell phones in Africa (“Africa’s PC”). Not suprisingly more than half the BarCamp attendees develop for mobile phone platforms: 27 responded Yes (52%) when asked whether they do any mobile phone application development. At the end of the camp, one of the mobile phone app developers was interviewed by a reporter for the NY Times.

The results of the survey are available as a Google Doc.